At the beginning of the story, Sean says aloud two words, these are "Stains" and "Heat".

Just by looking
into it, these two words doesn't have any significance. However, as I try to understand the story, I've
found out that these two words do have symbolic meaning. Stains represents the bad side of our
society. Nowadays, our current system is getting rotten by the cancer that is reflected upon us. This was
proved by the line in the story, "It was something that the hotel room had in common with the street
two stories below." Next, heat for me means the effect of your action if you get along with the problems
of the country. The line in the story,"Once it touched you, you were stuck with it.", made me think about
it. If you try to explore the society's flaws, you will be anchored within it.

In the story, McDonald was mentioned. In the beginning, Sean found it comforting because of the fact
that it gives relaxing and cool effect. However, as he stays longer, he had made a realization about what
he sees inside the McDonald. The way how the overweight rich kid treats their nannies bothered him.
He points out that these kids could be mature enough to get along with politics but their age do not suit
with their mental capacity and manner. Nowadays, kids are like these kids in the McDonald, they lack
discipline and do not possess good manners. As Sean burst a balloon, many people inside turned around
him. This means that if you do a wrong thing even if it is simple, people around you will always look
upon you. In the end, McDonald symbolizes our society.

The melting milkshake of Sean symbolizes the American influence in the Philippines. This influence is
getting bad overtime. The line in the story,"The milkshake had turned into a chocolate soup before it
was a quarter finished." made me realized that the American influence on us is like a good one in the
very beginning but if we open our eyes and mind fully, we could see that it slowly affects our system.

In the last part, the narrator of the story says that he is on top of two archipelago. The one is too big to
think about and the other is too big to see. For me, the Philippines is the one who is too big to think
about. Our society do have many problems that if we think about it, we do not know what to solve first.

Overall, the story is a good one. It depicts the real situation of our society nowadays. The author
symbolically pinpoints what is wrong with our system. The authors way of storytelling is very effective.
The story is very descriptive in nature that it helps me to understand it. I would like to recommend it
with every Filipino out there. Not reading "The Tesseract" is not just missing the chance to see the bad
side of our society but also losing the opportunity to make ourselves better for the sake of our country.